5  Dealing with file paths using here

6 Here

When looking at someone elses R code, you might see scripts or notebooks with lines with hard-coded paths, like this:

data <- read.table('/Users/Joselynn/Desktop/raw_data.txt')

Or maybe start like this:

setwd('/Users/Joselynn/Desktop')

These approaches aren’t wrong, they are a bit fragile and could break when your colleagues try to run your code on their computers. One way to avoid this is to use RStudio projects and the here package. RStudio projects are nice because they let you keep separate working environments for different projects and do lots of other very nice things for you (https://support.posit.co/hc/en-us/articles/200526207-Using-RStudio-Projects). You can make new RStudio projects through the RStudio app or with the usethis package (https://usethis.r-lib.org/reference/index.html). I’ve already set this repository up as an RStudio project. You can open the project by going up to File > Open Project and opening the reproducibility_r.Rproj in the base of this repo. Now you can use here to refer to paths:

here::here()

[1] "/users/jwalla12/reproducibility_r"

And you can build up full paths like this:

list.files(here::here('notebooks/book/_book'))

character(0)

You can setwd to change the working directory and here::here should still work:

setwd('~')
getwd()

[1] "/users/jwalla12"

here::here()

[1] "/users/jwalla12/reproducibility_r"